A Myth Long Forgotten

by Nigel Brown

To the many millions watching from the embrasures, the once familiar lay of the Nightland was gone forever.

After the Mist of Unseeing had arisen a thousand generations before, those first ventures into the poisonous fog had made plain that the Monstruwacans, even from their high tower, could no longer spy upon the Land.

They speculated from whence this fog had come. Perhaps the volcanoes visible to the North-West belched it from the dying Earth; perhaps it was the culmination of the Evil that worked against them: a shield to conceal preparations that would spring from the Land and devastate the Redoubt without warning. Or perhaps it was a benign Will that protected these last shreds of humanity from the ever-growing malice and sight of the Watchers.

The Monstruwacans’ attempts to disperse this opaque aerosol had failed completely. The wreckage of mobile fans a mile in diameter lay in shattered debris around the dark feet of the Redoubt. Bodies that had manned them, never too numerous to mourn, were visible when the Mist of Unseeing rolled back momentarily - just a few miles beyond the edge of the pale Electric Circle. Then the Mist swept in again in rhythmic pulsations like the breathing of a beast whose respiration was only measurable by the long, slow centuries that passed.

Perhaps it was the loss of that nightmare fixture of the Night Land in their lives, but after an aeon surrounded by fog, the threadbare society of the Redoubt began to break down. City turned against City, each convinced that the other took the greater of the failing Earth Current, to hoard it and turn its power against their neighbour. And plague wracked the millions. The Monstruwacans wondered if it was carried by the Mist, and sought to fortify the Air Clog, though all they achieved was to sap the Earth Current still further. And as the light dimmed over the Underground Fields, famine spread up the great Pyramid as a creeping death, until the Great Redoubt was as a colony of insects near destruction, with its tiny inhabitants milling this way and that, driven mad by a terror from within and not - as was supposed, from without.

Yet from an Upper City still strong for a time, there arose One who gathered together those still willing to follow. Some said he was a Monstruwacan willing to descend from the tower from which they’d long locked themselves within, come to bring order and peace to the Redoubt below. But some claimed he was a rogue, expelled from that High Place by the others for crimes that had been… or will be to come.

But the rumour of this One seeped down through the Cities as a counterpoint to the ravening plague and destruction that welled upward, pulling order out of chaos - for a time.

And the One declared that, at the End of these Days, it was right to march in triumph out of the Redoubt, for the Land had been unmade beneath the veil of the Mist of Unseeing, and was now a beautiful country awaiting the return of Her Children.

Yet some had misgivings over this: Had not their forefathers sealed themselves inside the Great Redoubt as protection against the Land? What if this were a trap, a final snare that would extinguish Mankind forever?

But the One answered: If this be a trap, then we will be marching from the one we have made for ourselves, those Ages ago. Does not the Great Redoubt fail around us? Are we to remain here to degenerate with the spirit of the Earth Current, until we slink like beasts within the dark corridors of what was once our glorious home? By its construction, our forefathers staved off our extinction long beyond our time. I say we must embrace this hidden land that now lies outside the Redoubt, if we are to preserve what humanity we have left. We will march shoulder-to-shoulder together, into a glorious future.

So the many millions listened and believed, and streamed down the Pyramid’s stairs in a Final March that flowed as a growing river cascading down to the Hall of the Great Gate.

But the few who remembered the words of the Monstruwacans went the other way. They ascended up beyond the Upper Cities to the Tower of Observation. Hence there came a great cleaving of humanity, in these Final Days.

And what was found by the Faithful (as they thought themselves) when they reached the Tower, is unknown. Some think that those faithful discovered the empty rooms of the Monstruwacans with all their occupants long dead, or disappeared, or abandoned to the levels below. No one knows, for none of the Faithful returned from their ascent, like the Monstruwacans that went before them.

But as for the rest, they overpowered the few Faithful who still guarded the Great Gate, and marched forth in set columns out of the Redoubt. They were ordered in Cities - men, women and children - and the now empty embrasures looked down upon the many millions as they walked to the perimeter of the electric circle, where the Mist of Unseeing was held back by the Air Clog.

And no one knew where was the One, for he was not at the head of the Last March of Man. The more charitable suggested he was with his own City, back amongst the last columns from the Upper Levels.

And as the first feet of this Army of the One stepped over the Electric Circle, the fog did indeed begin to lift.

And Light returned to the Night Land.

And - as had happened before, so long ago that it was less than myth - the Son began to rise.

The End